advantages of online marketing

Online marketing offers several advantages to marketers compared to conventional approaches. Its main ability is to weave together disparate aspects of a campaign – design, development, advertising, branding, and sales – into one beautiful tapestry.

The Internet offers many pluses including a cost-effective approach as compared to offline marketing. In the typical cost of one advertisement in a newspaper, you can buy one month’s advertising on the Internet. Also, you can reach a global audience in the same investment. The interactive nature of the medium allows ease of eliciting a response from customers. Following are the six advantages of online marketing.

Business Models:

The Internet supports a variety of business models including the B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer). Because of its direct reach to customers, companies can afford to offer their goods at lower prices, giving a good deal to the buyers. It is easier to generate leads for your business and advertising is also cheaper.

Targeting:

The accuracy with which you can target people on the Internet is quite amazing. For example, you can design your campaign to display your ads to people in a certain age group, residing in a particular zip code, with a specific educational qualification and relationship status.

Measurement:

Technology allows instant measurement of customer response. You can know instantly how many users have clicked on your banner, how many times your ad was displayed and what is the cost per click. This information allows the online marketer to tune his campaign in real-time.

User experience management:

The Internet allows marketers to manipulate user experience like never before. Since the user usually browses the Internet alone and not in a group, it is possible to customize his experience in great detail – colors, fonts, language, and preferences. The experience can be further made extremely rich using audio and video files.

Business Foundation:

The Internet has a life of its own. It is a rich soil for ideas to germinate. Today, you have an idea and tomorrow you can start your own business. The Internet offers the foundations for building an online business with templates, networks, communities of customers and many other options. You can virtually run a business from your home computer.

Integration:

Some campaigns complementing each other can be put into operation simultaneously. You can build static websites and announce the URL through various forums, combined with sending a direct response email right into the prospect’s inbox and place your banner on popular sites of interest to the consumer. You can even send an SMS to his mobile through an Internet site or the wireless Bluetooth technology.

Whether it is a single customer or a large base of customers, you can effectively reach both in the best way possible using the Internet. I hope you will also take effective advantage of the Internet to build your brand or business.

One significant fact to keep in mind is that because social networking is so very popular, many sites have popped up recently that cater to specific interest groups or niche markets. For example, there are social networking sites just for pet owners, wine enthusiasts and baby boomers. The list goes on and on. If you have a service or product that you know would appeal to a particular group, then it makes great sense to have a presence on the corresponding social media site. This way, you can market directly and specifically to your target group.

With all the exciting online marketing tools at your disposal, you will likely find many that will fit your needs. By utilizing the most established and relevant resources, your business will profit from these low-cost marketing strategies.